December

December dinners have included Liam's famous omelet (best with chard and aged gouda) three times during the week, every version of broccoli (or broccoli rabe) with pasta, Annie's (twice), a huge pot of whole grain chili with feta and olive oil (1/2, then frozen, then the other 1/2), a bagel, toast, Chik Patties (a box), and yes, popcorn (cheese grated on top a la francais).

Standards for dinner diminishing by the December day.

I managed salted chocolate caramels, but after advising Sara on the to-do for them, somehow ended up with a candy thermometer at 255 when the chocolate hit the caramel, pulled them off the stove, and ended up caramel frosting.

5 1/4 hours later I had spoon cookies, but rather than recommended 1/2 strawberry and 1/2 cherry preservers (we always end up with jars for 6 mos after), I used four fruits (strawberry, cherry, currant, raspberry), which gave them an aftertaste of aged raspberry.

I treated myself to Gourmet Today (with sticker for Gourmet included) and a book about Japanese cuisine and paged frantically until I found a recipe for Earl Grey truffles. Even a colleague whose tastes admittedly run from Uncrustables to Hormell pepperoni to Eggos told me they were the best chocolate she ever had (they did taste better the next day).

There has been toast for breakfast and sometimes, for dinner. There have been many bags of Cheerios (even a box from my Secret Santa). Mast Brothers continue to make a weekly appearance in my snack bag and for some reason, boxes of soy milk have seemed the right thing drink. And there was the week of Russ & Daughter's whitefish salad on rye crisps on Monday and a tin of piri piri mackerel on Wednesday, leaving our office smelling like cat food.

Today, with just a brioche bumping in my belly for hours of spa indulgence and two cups of tea, I came home to a box in the foyer fantastically festive. My name was on it in red and green.

Cookies.

Good ones. Really good ones.

From Cookbook Club.

I'm not ashamed to admit I cried. Tears that might be more representative of the work it takes to open a new middle school serving low-income students and preparing them for college, but they were real, and they were falling on the cookie box. Ziploc bags. Notes. Comments. Old favorites (moon cookies, cream wafers) and new (alfajores in chocolate, caramel-nutty-amazing-ness).

I brewed a cup of kukicha, ate some cookies for dinner, and finished packing the bag for Antigua.

I miss time to make South Indian feasts and rural Greek pastas for dinner. I miss leftovers that leave colleagues envious as they queue behind me at the microwave. I miss thinking about what to do with turnips all day and braising them in butter that evening. I miss the time to bake a souffle and prepare apples with caramelized maple sauce on the side.

I miss Cookbook Club. Especially in December.

Galette des Rois

I have been the king, nay, queen, three times in just as many days.

How can you not love a cake that is traditionally buttery, filled with frangipaine, and hiding the feve (literally bean, here, a charm that's in the cake), and comes with a paper crown classier than any BK biddy dare wear?

And for three days, I have gotten the feve, meaning, I get to parade around in the crown and fell a general sense of superiority.

I'm going to start a feve collection. Tres francais a friend says. Even though the Epiphany, the 12th Night has come and gone, I can eat this galette through the end of the month. Wish me almonds, and tell me to write down all my goals for 2008 while the future looks so golden.

Buche de Noel

When I was younger, Betsey always had a Buche de Noel at Christmas Dinner. I never liked it that much, but what I adored were the meringue mushrooms on top - sealed with dark chocolate and speckled with cocoa, they were by far my favorite. I have tried several times to make them, but I can never get them as crisp and toasty, as sweet and cut with the savory chocolate, the way that she can.

I have noticed in the past week that as the full-size ones come out for Christmas, some of the boulangeries have these buchettes as well. How could I resist? Une buchette praline yesterday at our favorite bakery and breakfast was all it took for me to cut into it. Not only am I a buttercream slut (sorry, but there's just no other word to describe my absolute submission to the stuff), but buche de noel is filled with sponge cake, which, as long as it isn't dry, is always delicious with the heavy frosting. Finally, the log is gilded, dare I say, with the meringue mushroom, and, in yesterday's case, a plastic ax (which Liam quickly fell for). Two fresh eggs scrambled and a hunk of baguette laden with butter later, and I ate my four bites of shared log more quickly than Liam could ask, "what is buttercream made from again?"

The reason I write about this love is not just because I have decided I must sample all buchettes in the 75004, but also because we then went to dinner at a friend's house (one of our French friends, yes, we do have them!) starving last night, still recovering from our little log. We ate a 1/4 pound of olives each, a few cherry tomatoes, and then a first course of salmon toasts, mache wilted salad with mushrooms and bread. They indulged in foie gras for the season and later Bulgarian beef four ways while I happily ate gnocchi and those risotto balls that they fry in Sicily with cheese inside. Our friend was not be outdone by contemporary times, and we had entire French meal which meant four cheeses for dessert (one man warned me "roquefort is very strong!" read: ye american gal): saint marcellin, saint felicien, and brie as well. Finally, after my brain was tired of all-French-all-the-time and several glasses of wine, a collective laugh squeaks out of our full bellies when our host says he has dessert also: a buche de noel!

From Le Notre, our host had picked up the most striking of buches I've seen to date: fire-engine red leaves along its sides, a candied leaf to cradle 6 raspberries, three macaron adorning the top with ornamental thread to hang on your tree if they made it that long and the inside: the lightest sponge cake with raspberries, lemon butter cream, and the fantastically poisonous and luscious red leaves around it. I was actually a little sad that Liam and I split a piece.

And so dear friends, despite the fact that I am mostly a grinch about Christmas and end of year festivities, I will happily sample the buches and buchettes in my neighborhood in the next few weeks and just hope the sun stays out so I can walk it all off into 2008.

Des Creoles

Part I: Last October, on our first full day in Valbonne (outside of Nice) visiting Liam's family, we walked this gorgeous, forested walk from their house into the village of Valbonne. We went straightaway to the boulangerie, looking for our first real croissant of the trip. We walked in, looked right down into the case and saw this pastry to the left, in a line of 6 - la negresse. I stopped full on in my tracks, pulled Liam close to me, and pointed wildly.

The next day, we returned with a camera. There was only one left.

Liam did the sleuthing, I began a tirade of revolution within the bakery - how I would start to work there, change them from the inside out, take whatever made this pastry so delicious and turn it into something a little less upsetting, like, say, a potato? We waxed poetic in our theories about what was behind this, we quizzed his family for historical context, but mostly, I was horrified.


Part II: We returned to this patisserie this past Saturday to say hello to our friend held at the mercy of the institutional racism of the patisserie. No camera (out to get butter and cream for the pumpkin pie I was about to make). We step in, look down to the right, and were shocked - there she was, no, not la negresse, but her thinly veiled cousin - Black Beauty. Written in English, same old colonial pastry with her chocolate breasts on her knees, but now Black Beauty didn't have the blackface of white icing or the hair, she was just enrobed in ebony chocolate, you know, like a black beauty.

Part III: My French teacher informs the student who describes what I'm wearing that my earrings, which he describes as round and I would have called hoops have a particular name in France: des Creoles ... because of, well, their history (as she explained it)

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I am not one to say that America's own history with race is anything but terrifying, but there's something about race in France that is new to me after 30 years in the US. Something that quickly goes from "hmmm, creoles you say?" to a vision of the map of colonial Africa memorized in AP European history. Race in France is like Oakland, yes, where every police car I see has a black face in the back of it, but also where French grandmothers have the sculptured African faces on their shelves and rich folks spend $500 not just on purses, but also on recycled bottle-cap tables that in Marais boutiques. Helping African people make a living or simply just gobbling up a colonial consumerism? And then today, multiple emails from friends asking me if I'm affected by the riots here.

It's enough to make me alternately reminisce for slow days spent writing about post-colonial thought and the African diaspora and yearn for days when I'll be back to doing something about it - 8 years working to close the achievement gap for students of color in this country and now I'm here fuming over pastries and earrings.

In college, I was reprimanded in Japanese class for asking why the character for 'weak' is also in the character for 'woman,' but I have always been a rebel-rouser, even when it comes to pastries.